As mobile applications become more and more widespread amongst smart phones such as the iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia N Series, LG POP, Samsung Galaxy, Palm Pre, Google Nexus One, and more recently new tablet computers such as Apple's iPad, users will need to manage an ever-increasing number of applications inside these devices.
Even though phone makers have began to provide User-Interface (UI) solutions to allow users to group, access and launch their applications faster and more easily, these become necessarily inefficient as the number of applications grows dramatically inside the device, hence requiring the user to manually arrange or delete applications according to their own usage. Furthermore, once many applications have been installed on the mobile device, it becomes harder for a user to remember which set of applications can be used in a particular setting, at a particular time and for a particular use or context.
Certainly, there are mobile applications implementing Augmented Reality techniques and more generally Location-Based Services which, if and only if the user agrees to be geo-localized, can bring a plurality of information or services based on that location. Yet, these applications are designed to gather information from data associated with GPS, GSM triangulation techniques and the like to display a predefined UI based on that data, which necessarily makes it difficult for said applications to perform an entirely new functional behavior based on what the user can do in the particular context.
U.S. patent application (Ser. No. 12/041,971) describes a method for computing a novelty index value based on the location of the user. The method specifically allows to display on the mobile terminal appropriate recommendations or personalized information determined by where the user is or how often he has been in a particular location. Because the resulting display is configured from applications that are “set in the device”, this limits the range of possibilities to the ones that have been pre-installed in the mobile phone.
Other systems such as mentioned U.S. Pat. No. 7,058,895 describe a method and a conceptual structure allowing users to customize their mobile terminal based on their own preferences. This method requires the user to manually pre-define his contextual preferences by using a PC application to build the said conceptual structure by adding nodes to a conceptual graph. Among other this method presents the disadvantages of forcing the user to use a PC application in order to benefit from the adaptive UI on the mobile device therefore complexifying the process for the user while increasing the time to operate.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,590,681 describes a method and a system for managing and delivering web content for internet appliances. The patent involves letting a user customize the display of web content on an internet appliance such as mobile phone, PDA, and the like.
This method forces the user to manually configure his device and the type of content to be displayed when using this device, adding complexity and Lime to operate for an average mobile-device user.
US Patent 2010/0042463 describes a software or hardware facility for providing an enhanced shopping experience. The proposed invention determines user characteristics such as location (location, population density, etc.) or demographic (age, gender, occupation, etc.) and consolidates these results with the mobile device's characteristic such as its location or its identifier. The resulting data is used to retrieve product and shopping information based on advertiser-defined parameters.
The invention of the above mentioned document uses different context modules in order to determine which is the best product offer to display on the user's mobile device. However, the invention relates to product queries in relation to user and mobile characteristics and requires the device to have previously stored a delivered message which implies that the client software needs to have been pre-programmed to do so. This further implies that no application other than the ones capable of interfacing with said software or hardware facility can be operated by the user contrarily to what is claimed by the present invention.